Tuesday, October 02, 2012

My next focus area is the team model. Especially in the
context of distributed software engineering, I have to work with many projects where there are
distributed teams involved. So I try to capture some of the key information
about the team models used in each project.

Team collaboration
model

The team collaboration model can be tightly integrated team
member concept with all the locations (working on 1 vertical) , or loosely
integrated teams from different locations running scrum of scrum(working on multiple verticals) or even it
can be independent teams in each location. So I would capture the collaboration
model based on geography distribution.

Further I would find how many members are involved in each
location for each project/team. That will give me a good overview about the
developer distribution of the projects across geographies in each project.

Role of Product owner

Do you have a product owner?

In most projects we work with, there is a product owner or
owners working with the team. In some of the projects, there are no Product
owners and the team owns the product.

Is the product owner role effective?

Better to know. Mostly with offshore development teams, the
success of the product is highly dependent on the guidance of the onsite
product owner who is closer to the real users of the system and market
conditions. I try to get the teams to score this in a scale of 1-5(1 as the
least effective and 5 as sufficient). There are many factors we can consider to
rate the effectiveness of the PO role. (Ex: prioritization, ownership of the functional
requirements, participation for grooming meetings, timely decisions, ownership
of the backlog etc.)

Use of Product owner proxies
Not very popular, however not very uncommon either in most offshore-onshore
engagements. Better to know which projects of yours use Proxies for distant
team members.

Role of Team
Lead/Scrum master

Its important to know whether there is a scrum master in
each location, each team or whether the scrum master is located in a different location.
This needs to be figured out with the team collaboration model as well.
However, from the project office perspective, you will know that when you have
distant scrum masters in the team, you need more facilitation to the team members in other locations.
Its hard for a remote scrum master to feel the pain of his or her team members.